This is helpful not only to track how the users utilize the platform and refine its services accordingly, but also to map their tastes as consumers.
Google realised that the patterns emerging from the analysis of data could reveal important features of the users. This is the central dynamic taken on in? the book. Pushed by the pressure of investors mounting in the immediate aftermath of the dot-com bubble’s explosion (71-74), however, the tech giant realised that the quantity and variety of information generated could hold great potential for revenue, and started a conversion of ‘data exhaust’ into ‘behavioural surplus’ (338). With the boom of digital technologies multiplying the interactions with the online search engine, the volume of data produced started quickly to exceed the amount necessary for the improvement of its services, an excess at first considered as mere ‘data exhaust’ (68).
At first this information was exclusively reinvested in what Zuboff calls a ‘behavioural reinvestment cycle’ (69-70), as the analysis of the data contributes to making the platform’s systems smarter, refining for, example, suggestion algorithms and other services. This data is of no interest to the users, but constitutes traces that the platform can collect for free as ‘digital breadcrumbs’ (90). Users’ interactions with the famous search engine had always produced a superabundance of metadata originating as a by-product of their activities: ‘For example, in addition to key words… the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location’ (67). According to Zuboff, in fact, the digital has allowed the invention of a ‘new logic of accumulation’ currently on course to become dominant (14), a ‘new actor in history, both original and sui generis… unprecedented in economic history’ (13-14), that she names surveillance capitalism.įor the author, the age of surveillance capitalism began in 2001, when Google started to develop an economic strategy based on the collection and processing of behavioural information.
Her latest work, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, proposes a thoroughly documented framework through which understand how the evolution and the capillary diffusion of digital technologies have transformed capitalism. Professor emerita at Harvard Business School, Shoshana Zuboff has studied the impact of digital technologies on economy and society since the 70s.
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